Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth is a prominent Indian author known for his versatility across various literary genres, including poetry, fiction, and children's literature. Born in Calcutta in 1952, he pursued higher education at Oxford University, where he studied philosophy, economics, and politics, before moving to Stanford University for advanced economics and creative writing. His early works include poetry collections and travel narratives, with notable titles such as *Mappings* and *From Heaven Lake*. In 1993, he gained widespread acclaim for his epic novel *A Suitable Boy*, which explores themes of Indian culture and postcolonial life, although it faced mixed critical reviews and was notably not shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Seth's writing is characterized by its technical mastery of traditional poetic forms and its exploration of relationships and loneliness. His works often reflect a multicultural perspective shaped by his experiences in India, China, the United States, and Europe. He has received multiple accolades, including the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and an Order of the British Empire in 2001. In recent years, he has continued to produce literary works, with a sequel to *A Suitable Boy* anticipated but yet to be published. Seth's contributions to literature underscore his role as a significant world writer who bridges cultural and temporal divides.
Vikram Seth
Indian poet and author
- Born: June 20, 1952
- Place of Birth: Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Biography
Vikram Seth is a versatile writer who is at ease in several genres. He has made a place for himself as an Indian writing in English. Seth was born in Calcutta, India, in 1952. He left India to study at Oxford University in England, earning degrees in philosophy, economics, and politics. He then enrolled at Stanford University to study advanced economics. While at Stanford, Seth was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing. He wrote the poetry collected in Mappings (1980) during this time.
From 1980 to 1982, Seth went to China to do economic research and travel. He studied classical Chinese poetry and language at Nanjing University. His account of a hitchhiking journey from China through Tibet to India was published as From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1983.
Returning to California, Seth published several books of poetry. The Humble Administrator’s Garden (1985), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, is divided into three sections that identify their influences: Chinese, Indian, and Californian. The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986) was widely reviewed and critically well-received. It established Seth’s reputation as a poet and popular writer. The novel is a 307-page series of nearly six hundred sonnets of iambic tetrameter, loosely modeled on Russian poet Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1825–32). The narrative is driven by the lives and entanglements of its characters. Each character is part of a subculture of San Francisco life, and through them, Seth demonstrates his thorough familiarity with his setting, San Francisco, in the 1980s. The Golden Gate won the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voice Award and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1986.
After the publication of The Golden Gate, Seth returned to India to live with his family and work on his major epic, A Suitable Boy (1993). Three additional books of poetry were published between the two novels: All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990), Beastly Tales from Here to There (1991), and Three Chinese Poets (1992), all of which demonstrate Seth’s diversity of material and multicultural background.
A Suitable Boy, published in 1993, is Seth’s best-known work. The book is a thirteen-hundred-page epic of Indian culture, religion, family life, and postcolonial politics. This novel propelled Seth into the public spotlight, launching a series of interviews, talk show appearances, and book signings. Critical reviews were mixed, however, and the public and his publishers were disappointed when the book was not considered for the Booker Prize in 1993. It did win the W. H. Smith Award and earned Seth the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.
After A Suitable Boy, Seth returned to London, where the English National Opera commissioned him to write a libretto based on the Greek legend of Arion and the dolphin. This material was also published as a children’s book in 1994. His 1999 novel, An Equal Music, is set in London and the Continent and is a love story about the members of a string quartet. Seth was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2001 for his achievements.
Seth’s work is noted for its versatility and variety of setting and form. His settings reflect the multicultural and geographic variety of his life experiences, with major works set in India, China, London, Europe, and the United States. Translation has played a role in his life and work as well, expanding his multicultural influences.
Seth has written successful and prizewinning work in various genres: poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, as well as opera libretti and children’s tales. He is noted for his technical mastery of traditional forms in poetry, using rhyme and meter unusual in a poet of the late twentieth century. A Suitable Boy has been described as having the style of a nineteenth-century novel, and critics have compared its scope and some of its themes to the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy. Seth’s introductions to some of his own work suggest that as his academic training was in economics rather than English, he followed his own eclectic inclinations and tastes in his reading and writing.
While Seth’s forms tend toward the traditional, his themes and sensibilities suggest the difficulty of forming relationships, the ultimate failure of love as a bond, and the loneliness of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century life, no matter where the tale is set. Vikram Seth’s importance is as a world writer, a writer in English who embraces the language, culture, and influence of the English-speaking world, the non-English Western world, and the Eastern regions of India and China as well. He is also important as a writer who unites the traditional forms of the nineteenth century and earlier with the themes and sensibilities of the late twentieth century.
In 2009, Seth received a $1.7 million advance from publisher Hamish Hamilton to complete A Suitable Girl, the sequel to A Suitable Boy. However, Seth missed the June 2013 deadline for the book and was asked to return the advance. After the deal fell through, Orion, the original publisher of A Suitable Boy, made a deal to publish the sequel, A Suitable Girl. However, by the mid-2020s, the novel had yet to come to fruition. Seth continued to publish in the twenty-first century. A Suitable Boy was adapted into a television miniseries in 2020. Seth published a volume of poems, Summer Requiem, in 2015 and the collection Elephant and the Tragopan (2013). Seth also published The Louse and the Mosquito (2020), a work of children’s fiction.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse, 1986
A Suitable Boy, 1993
An Equal Music, 1999
Poetry:
Mappings, 1981
The Humble Administrator’s Garden, 1985
All You Who Sleep Tonight, 1990
Beastly Tales from Here to There, 1992
The Poems, 1981–1994, 1995
The Rivered Earth, 2011
Elephant and the Tragopan, 2013
Summer Requiem, 2015
Translation:
Three Chinese Poets: Translations of Poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, 1992
Hanuman Chalisa, 2024
Nonfiction:
From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet, 1983
Two Lives, 2005
The Rivered Earth, 2011
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Arion and the Dolphin, 1994
The Louse and the Mosquito, 2020
Bibliography
Agarwalla, Shyam S. Vikram Seth’s "A Suitable Boy:" Search for an Indian Identity. New Delhi: Prestige, 1995.
Armitstead, Claire. “Vikram Seth Finds a Suitable Publisher.” The Guardian, 13 Sept. 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/sep/13/vikram-seth-suitable-boy-girl-publisher. Accessed 10 July 2024.
Corey, Stephen. Rev. of All You Who Sleep Tonight, by Vikram Seth. The Ohio Review, vol. 47, 1991, pp. 132–39.
"'I Did it for my own Private Pleasure:' Vikram Seth on Translating the Hanuman Chalisa into English." Scroll.in, 21 June 2024, scroll.in/video/1069602/i-did-it-for-my-own-private-pleasure-vikram-seth-on-translating-the-hanuman-chalisa-into-english. Accessed 10 July 2024.
King, Bruce. “World Literature in Review: India.” World Literature Today, vol. 68.2, 1994, pp. 431–32.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Homeward Ho! Silicon Valley Pushkin.” American Poetry Review, vol. 15.6, 1986, pp. 37–46.
Perry, John Oliver. “World Literature in Review: India.” Rev. of All You Who Sleep Tonight, by Vikram Seth. World Literature Today, vol. 65.3, 1991, pp. 549–50.
Roy, Devapriya.“‘A Suitable Girl’ Is Coming. What Was It Like to Read Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’ 24 Years Ago?” Scroll.in, 26 May 2017, scroll.in/article/838477/a-suitable-girl-is-coming-what-was-it-like-to-read-vikram-seths-a-suitable-boy-24-years-ago. Accessed 26 May. 2017.
Seth, Vikram. Introduction and foreword to The Poems, 1981–1994. New York: Viking, 1995.
“Vikram Seth Asked to Return $1.7m 'Suitable Girl' Advance.” The Week, 10 July 2013, theweek.com/books/54050/vikram-seth-asked-return-17m-suitable-girl-advance. Accessed 10 July 2024.
Walton, James. "Summer Requiem by Vikram Seth, Review: 'Serene.'" The Telegraph, 30 Mar. 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11496805/Summer-Requiem-by-Vikram-Seth-review.html. Accessed 10 July 2024.
Woodward, Richard B. “Vikram’s Seth’s Big Book.” New York Times Magazine, 2 May 1993, pp. 32–36.